Installing Homebrew on Arch (Manjaro) Linux

Being a MacOS user refugee, I've long appreciated and used Homebrew as a user-mode package manager. While Linux distros are famous for their truly excellent package management utilities, I just like Homebrew. I know it, it's single-user capable which is what I prefer (no root necessary), and it works.

Except for one thing: installation fails on Manjaro Linux (an Arch derivative). It claims there's no Ruby available to it at the version it needs - not even the version that the installer fetches and embeds within brew itself!

Well I thought that was just nuts. So I dug around the guts a little and ran Ruby 2.6.8 as shipped with Homebrew and found that it complains a cryptographic library is missing at runtime. So, simple solution: install the library!

$ sudo pacman -Syu libxcrypt-compat

And that's it, brew should now install and run just fine on Arch.

Quick tip: to install Homebrew on Linux WITHOUT sudo/root, first make sure that you don't have a valid/active sudo session when you run the installer script. Then, it should give you an option to CTRL+D to not use root/sudo - so do that to install to $HOME/.linuxbrew/. Set up your shell according to the directions and you should be good to go from there.